You Never Forget Your First Web Server

It was nearly 10 years ago (mid 1996) that I first put my own web server on the Internet. Back in college, I managed to convince one of the staff to give my personal computer a static IP address so that I could run a web server. At the time there were no other student computers on the campus network, let alone with static addresses.

It was a year of firsts for me and for the University.

At the time my nearly state of the art computer was a 486 DX2/66 with 16MB of RAM running Linux 2.0.0. (I still remember upgrading from 1.x.x.) The computer lived at the address pizza.bgsu.edu (that link goes to the Internet Archive, where you can see pizza's old home page). I put my homepage there, as did several friends. We used telnet (gasp!) to login and update things.

I remember spending something like $100 for the Ethernet card, a 3Com 509 with 10base2, 10base-T, and "thick" ethernet. Computers didn't all come with built-in network ports back then. And $100 was a lot of money for a lowly undergrad. But being in the Internet was important to me.

I remember learning Perl and CGI programming in 1996 too. In fact, I built my first "web application" that year and ran it for a few years. Sadly, the Internet Archive never captured the "Vote on Bowling Green's Best Pizza" site I had built. It became quite popular on campus (among those who used the web, at least!)

That application led to the student government paying me $400 a year or so later to build the first on-line voting system. That's right, back in 1997 or 1998 we had the option of voting on-line for our student government elections. That involved more Perl code (complete with socket programming) and a little flat-file database system (with locking) to hold the data. No PHP, no MySQL.

That experience led to a few side jobs doing "web programming" (for rates that seemed really high back then, but it was the beginning of Bubble 1.0), an 8 month systems administration internship in the Computer Science Department, turning down the chance to work at Yahoo! (back in 1997 or so, but that's a story for another day), a longer-running co-op with Marathon Oil Company doing Intranet and Internet Web development, graduation, a full-time job at Marathon, and ultimately moving to California to work for Yahoo in late 1999.

Anyway, the first web server stayed on the school network for a few years and eventually saw a motherboard upgrade. (Remember when we used to upgrade motherboards instead of buying completely new computers?) It then became what it is today: a Pentium 133 with 96MB of RAM running Linux. It went on to be my home Linux server for years, gaining a second network card (it was my gateway/firewall before Linksys made such devices), CD-ROM drive, and so on.

Now, 10 years later I'm giving it away on craigslist. My own little piece of history that no longer serves a practical purpose and nobody is likely to pay money for it. But it still works. ;-)

My first web server was WebStar, running on a Macintosh Quadra. Total workhorse. Never crashed, just ran and ran and ran. It's been gone for a very long time, thrown in a dumpster along with tons of other obsolete posessions in 2003. It hadn't been serving web pages for three or four years at the time of its demise.

I don't exactly remember which my first web server was. It should be around 1995 or 1996. If it was in 1995, the webserver was a Solaris box with Netscape server; if it was in 1996; the platform was either Mac OS 7, Windows NT 3.51 or Linux running WebSTAR, IIS and Apache respectively. I still remember that in 1997 I was in charge of a Linux box running NCSA web server.

My first web server was one I wrote while I was bored trying to convicne the folks at LapLink (Traveling Software) that the Internet was going to big. I remember one day thinking gopher was cool to seeing the first web browser and being blown away. So, I ended up writing an web server and it actually ran the first Traveling Software web site for a while. I don't recall the hardware, but it was something bitch'n for the time. I later ended up packaging the same server code as an OCX and made it so any app for Windows could have HTTP capabilities. Ah, the memories.

My first and only web server was a Abit BP6 running dual celeron 350s overclocked to 500MHz with 512Mhz (later 1GB) of RAM. I bought the stuff new so if you remember when the BP6 came out you can determine the date. That System was configured as a LAMP system and I learned a bit about PHP and MySQL. It ran pretty much non-stop until a year ago when it got hacked badly via an Apache vulnerability. I retired it immediately after discovery of the hack (which rendered my website totally unusable). I have not found a proper home for my web presence yet. I gave that system away this morning.

My first webserver was a 486 DX4-75 lappy with merely 8Mb of RAM running Slackware 2.x (Linux 1.2.8? I think) and can't remember what httpd was it. It was '96.

It wasn't really a "server" as it actually lacks decent network connection. It was on a lappy because I used it to demo a Perl CGI app I wrote for a library. It runs the whole thing (httpd, Perl-CGI + X + browser). In fact in demo mode it runs no window manager but bootstraps maximised Netscape in its .xinitrc. Usable, but swaps like crazy.

My first server was around 1995-6. A Mac, I think it was a Centris of some kind, it moved to being a PowerMac 7100 later on. It was christened the Unseen Machine, and lived at http://unseen.ttg.waikato.ac.nz/ in the old Teaching Technology Group at Waikato University. It ran a mix of things, but most often Webstar, Userland Frontier and Filemaker Pro, and allowed the multimedia dev staff (including me) to get a taste of the web.

I remember being pretty excited when we had hits from MIT and Macromedia (we were a big Director shop) in the same week.

That server also ran a weird Mac chat room server of some kind that I publicized through a column in the student newspaper, and it attracted a small group of followers - most of whom I never met.

It's been awhile so I don't have the exact date anymore but it must have been some time in 1993 I put up the early CERN http server up on our VMS cluster (running on a trio of VAX 4600's). It eventually replaced our gopher server on the same machine (which itself replaced a VTX installation.).

One of those interesting exercises... had to start with installing a C compiler. And when I wanted Perl I had to build that from scratch. The wonders of working in a non-Unix mini-computer environment in the early 90's. The Unix guys on campus had it much easier when they did the same thing later...

My first web server was some sorry Mac that no one wanted backe in 1994. It was also the University of Texas at San Antonio's first web server. No one thought it mattered, and one day I came in to my office to find the Mac taken apart and the memory gone. Apparently, one of the techs thought that a secretary's computer that needed an upgrade was more important than the University's web server. Back then, he was probably right -- but still...

My very first webserver was a NeXT slab, believe it or not. I had picked one up through a friend of a friend in '95 to kick around. They had a tendency to not run headless so you had to plug the monitor in, boot, then unplug. The monitor was this greyscale 19" monster so it wasn't practical to keep in the closet. Finally I read that you could use 2 or 3 capacitors and connect some pins on the video out port to make it boot headless. I did that and covered it with scotch tape - ran for years like that.

Around the same time at my day job, I used a quadra 800 to start my company's first website, using Webstar and this funky little app called Aretha, which was the free release of frontier. That was the dawn of content management systems for me.

Hey Joe, I'm STILL using a BP6 (Celery 400's clocked to 525) as my primary desktop. In it's 7 years of life, it's run BSD, Linux, BeOS (Prevue Release through v5), NT, Win2K, Win2K Server, and now XP.

Trotters is long gone. And last I checked the vote (I had to be one of the last to check) Pisanellos had a 13 vote edge on Myles, proving that some people do in fact pay attention to the Health Inspector.

For two years, I spent more time next to Pizza than I did going to class. And I have the transcripts to prove it.

What a coincidence. My first PC built (in late 95 or early 96) had the same case as your pizza. It was AMD's 486 clone - the best 486 you could get that time. I was running Slackware, compiling, configuring, and running everything there was - kernel, apache, squid, various window managers, everything. That was tons of fun! I think I used it for 2-3 years, then replaced with Celeron266 running on 400 MHz - after few months I realized the fan on cpu is not working, but the machine had no problems, so I let it just running, without fan, overclocked at 50%.

Sergeant, a 386 SX-16 with 5 MB of RAM with coax ethernet running Slackware something-or-other. I lived in rez at the time, I was on the second floor, the connection went out my window upstairs, then window to window across the wing, and finally up a telephone conduit to a computer lab. Sergeant eventually became someone's firewall (and my backup MX) when we moved out of rez, then the magic smoke came out of the box and it was retired.

Ah, I don't remember the specs on my system, but I do remember in 1995 or so, while I was supposed to be actually studying for my JD and MBA degrees, I was playing with O'Reilly's "Web Site" Web server software... and used a dynamic IP thingy so I was able to have http://adam.eigenmann.indiana.edu/ or something like that (eigenmann -- the name of my dorm at Indiana University). I also had an ftpd running, an e-mail list, a shell account of course, and so on. Ah, what fun days!

Oh. And my first web server was sort of a blur. I had a 486 SX/33 for a while that ran Linux 2.0 or so. Upgraded from my DOS addiction.

Then I managed to h4x0r a 14.4 modem connection to my local school (shhhhhh) which I used basically as a slooow FTP/HTTP server. It would end up dropping off the Internet before I'd ever need to use it though.

.. and yes... telnet. But I wrote the daemon myself so.... thats cooler.

Then I managed to sucker these guys to actually PAY me to work on computers at which point I convinced them that their Windows machined had to go. The let me install a version of Apache in the corner to keep me happy but it ended up becoming production. w00t!

My first web server was in 1998 (or 1999) -- I was in college, building a web-based ordering and proof system for business cards for a major university in the Boston area (not the same one I was going to). I was hacked with a root kit every 6 months, until I learned better. I should say that the machine was a Dell server, purchased by the university's reprographics company, and it lived in my house.

Now THAT application was interesting. They were still running on Mac OS 9, and this was before PHP and graphics manipulation were hot. Using Perl and a template, I generated proofs. Once the order was placed, the system sent the order to a machine running OS 9, and used Applescript to fill in a Quark Xpress template.

Ooooh, my very first webserver was a Color NeXTStation that I managed to get NCSA httpd to run on. It was a 68040 with a whopping 32 MB of RAM and maybe a few hundred MB of disk space. That must have been around 1993, 1994 maybe (sometime during my grad student days). Don't remember exactly when. That NeXTStation eventually turned into a department webserver and hosted the department web pages until around 97 or so when the NeXTs we had were taken out of service and replaced with PCs.

486 10 years ago.... Hell, you can still run a 486 as a web server today.

I currently run a Pentium 166mhz running DSL(Damn Small Linux) as my web server today. It isn't much newer that your 486. I have Apache, PHP, MySQL DB, all running on my old system from my house. Yes, that is MySQL... MySQL database is the backend on my chat forum I have. www.planetxapps.com/forum/index.php

Try it out...

I have a standard DSL connection (384K up and down)... because I don't have a ton of bandwidth, you don't need a real powerful system to run a 384K DSL connection. I also have my web server working as an email server and remote proxy. I am using DSL 2.3 www.damnsmalllinux.org

My first webserver was in 1998 - I was at Sun and set up a Sparc Station 20 with Solaris 7, Apache 1.3 or something. I wrote these gnarly resourcehog scripts to make index pages - did not know perl or about PHP. That served our lab for 3-4 years until it was retired and upgraded.

hai guys i need help as i am hosting my first web server i am using a webstar cable modem i have done i right but the cable moden is not letting me other computers on the internet to get the site viewed i used no-ip to get a domain and please help me

I owe you a big big thank you for letting me use your pizza.bgsu.edu server back in the day!

on June 10, 2008 12:23 PM

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